So I've tried to blog a bit since I've been here, but every post has either gotten interrupted or been too boring to publish, so here I go again. Here's hoping this one sticks.
I arrived in Grand Junction on January 2nd, exactly one month after I left Lee Vining. I spent a glorious month at home skiing, spending time with family and friends, buying my first car, and enjoying a full month with no work and few committments. Every time I return to Bozeman I go through a new set of emotions. It's still home, but that feeling of belonging has started to slip away. My Bozeman friends have either moved away or created new lives for themselves with people that I don't know. Much of the town itself has changed as well, and many of my favorite businesses are either gone or have moved somewhere else. I've begun to feel like a visitor in my past life when I'm in Bozeman and though that can be fun for awhile, it's also important to me to keep moving.
This past stint in Lee Vining is the longest I've been anywhere for several years. I really started to nest there and feel at home. It was hard to leave a place and a community I loved so much. However, it has inspired me to create that kind of community in any place I live. This never happens overnight, and as a result my first couple weeks in Colorado, in addition to being ridden with minor house dramas and the settling in phase at my new job, were a little rough. Beth and my work schedule is a little crazy - 8-5 with an hour long commute on either end - so we were spending a few hours each night trying to get our house furnished and livable while fighting with first frozen and then burst pipes, no dishwasher or internet.
But with a first week like that, everything else looks easy and over the last couple weeks we've really begun to settle in and enjoy our house. We live in a quiet neighborhood near the college and not too far from downtown. We've got a huge fenced backyard for our dogs (two black labs, one 11 year old, one 6 month old) and beautiful old wood floors. Grand Junction is really beginning to feel like home and I'm beginning to measure my time here in years rather than months.
In our time off, we try to adventure and explore as much as possible. We spent a great weekend in Laramie with good friends from Africa. We watched lots of football, reminisced about study abroad experiences and went to a phenomenal country show at a cowboy bar. We spent a weekend skiing on the mesa and are planning for many more.
On top of all of this, I've been playing some volleyball at the Gold's Gym here and meeting some really great people. One new friend even spent a good deal of time in Lee Vining/June Lake and is the nephew of a park ranger that I knew there. I never cease to be amazed by the connections between people.
One final note - Beth and I are working really hard to train for a half marathon. She'll run one on March 12th in Little Rock, AR and depending on her recovery, hopefully run one with me the following weekend here in Gateway, CO. In order to motivate ourselves to keep up the training, we've registered for a 10k in two weeks in Fruita. I've done a bit of running here and there in my post-college life, but I've never really had races to train for (not because I want to do well, simply because I don't want to keel over and die) so it's really nice to have that date looming in the back of my head each morning when I wake up at 4:45 and think, "Wouldn't it be easier just to go back to sleep?"
All in all, things are going well here. I'm keeping very busy and enjoying most of my daily goings on. I don't have any pictures to post because I've been super lazy about taking pictures, but hopefully soon that will change. We skied Powderhorn on Sunday and the view from the top of Grand Mesa was breathtaking. Flat-top mountains that fold in onto themselves and form this crinkle-scape that catches light and casts shadow with incredibly minute detail. It's unlike any place I've lived before and I'm looking forward to becoming intimate with this landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment